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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-06-18 Daily Xml
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Women's Unemployment

The Hon. J.S. LEE (14:54): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the minister for employment and the status of women a question about women's unemployment.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.S. LEE: South Australia's unemployment rate has hit a 14-year high, rising to 7.6 per cent in May 2015. The increase was driven by a rise in women's unemployment, which skipped up to 7.5 per cent from 6.9 per cent in April and is now at its highest rate since May 2000.

The Australian Council for Social Service indicated in a report that women (including young women and female children) face a significantly higher risk of poverty than men due to women's lower employment opportunities and wages. It also reported that a decline in the workforce participation rate can have a long-term damaging effect. It shows that people have, in effect, found 'the fight to get a job' so hard they have given up and are no longer actively looking for work.

The business sector as a whole provides good employment opportunities for women. However, a multitude of arrangements between South Australian businesses and private providers for traineeships will effectively cease under the government's new WorkReady policy. The industry estimates the flow-on effect to associated business activities could result in approximately 10,000 job losses. My questions to the minister are:

1. What specific strategies will the minister introduce to address employment problems faced by women, particularly those who have given up looking for jobs?

2. Will the government reintroduce exemptions on payroll tax for apprentices and trainees to improve opportunities for young women looking for jobs?

3. Will the government respond to industry calling for the government to hold the decision on WorkReady so that a proper consultation and redesigning of the scheme can actually create jobs and not end up with further job losses?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:56): I thank the honourable member for her most important questions. Employment is a major priority for this government and our jobs plan is to ensure that we diversify our economy to transition out of the more traditional manufacturing automotive sector into more advanced manufacturing sectors to look at stimulating and driving investment, supporting business and growing jobs, and women's participation in the paid workforce is a very important part of that.

Increasingly, participation of women in employment and also in leadership roles, and ensuring their safety continues to be a very important priority for the Weatherill government. We are also committed to ensuring that women can access information through the Women's Information Service and that we continue to receive specialist advice about women's issues through the Premier's Council for Women.

In terms of women in science and technology engineering, the Department for Education and Child Development, the Department of State Development and the Office for Women have developed a promotional campaign to encourage women to access training in high-demand non-traditional industries such as mining, defence and construction. Building on previous support for pre-employment and leadership development programs, this strategy now also includes the development of an online resource on the Office for Women's website dedicated to increasing participation in science, technology, engineering and maths.

The transition from study to employment is one of the key points where we find that women drop out of STEM, and that is why we have developed assistance to help women stay engaged. In relation to workplace flexibility, that is another area we've done a great deal of work in. The Labor government, in terms of the Public Service, will make public sector chief executives personally responsible for ensuring that flexible work options are available to staff who need them.

Chief executives will also have a new imperative to increase the number of women in executive positions within the public sector. We are also looking at the ongoing recognition of women's contribution to society, and their representation at all levels of social and professional life, including the promotion of women in non-traditional areas of employment.

Our Premier's Council for Women has developed a number of initiatives to assist the private sector to think about the way they employ women, and to ensure that they have better representation of women in their organisations, particularly in senior and executive positions. That tool has been very much embraced by the private sector in particular and used by a number of organisations.

In terms of WorkReady, I have already put on the record in this place the principles behind WorkReady. It is a training policy that is strongly focused on achieving real jobs at the end of training, and not just training for training's sake and creating a lot of churn at the certificate II level. This is about ensuring that we improve the employment outcomes in terms of our invested training dollar, which is obviously public money.

We are seeking to improve our completion rates. We are requiring that training providers do better assessments of individuals who want to engage in training activities to better identify and make sure we are putting the right person in the right place, and if they need additional pre-employment or foundation skills prior to enrolling in a particular course they can access that, thus we reduce the number of people enrolled in courses for which they are ill-equipped and which they are not prepared to undertake.

We have put in a number of measures to ensure far better employment outcomes and better completion rates. As I have indicated, our training activity will be slightly more in 2015-16 than it is this year, so we continue to undertake significant levels of subsidised training activity.

As I have outlined, we have a plan over the next four years to increase the contestability and openness in our marketplace, with the ultimate goal that by 2018-19 TAFE SA will be required to compete with private providers in terms of its commercial activity on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Over those four years we will see a much stronger and competitive marketplace, and we hope that that will continue to drive efficiencies in our system.

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